When legislators and government entities draft statutes to regulate commerce, a certain type of legal language is employed to describe the various entities, their relationships, and constraints on behavior of said entities. These drafters often use limiting language and purposeful descriptions to specify the method to which laws, rules, and regulations must be obeyed. Entities affected by these regulations must comply using various means, including the use of computer processing systems to analyze information and determine with simplistic Boolean algebra if the presented information falls within the regulatory guidelines. These tests are authored by computer programmers using a multitude of computer languages on systems of varying size and complexity. All these systems have commonalties, including a limitation that the executable language is transmitted in whole apart from the data it contains. The data may be part (a resource) of the underlying executable program.
By using a compound document type based on XML, or eXtensible Markup Language and a description of the Boolean logic, a document can be created that contains all needed components for validating and processing a particular information sets' compliance with regulatory information directly relevant to the aforementioned document. This compound document contains sections that describe meta-information about the document, data in the form of discrete values, legal terminology, and legal conditions. The complexity of developing such a system involves the production of legal terms and conditions capable of satisfying the demanding exactitude of computer processing systems while maintaining human readability of legal terminology. This legal terminology must be proved exactly and faithfully represented by the computer system in order to substantiate the human-readable legal text. The legal text binds the actions of the parties to a particular course or courses of action and represents a meeting of the minds. Computer systems must be able to elucidate the intent of those minds and discern from those legal terms an exact and uncompromising Boolean argument capable of providing two determinate outcomes, true or false. In the event that the computer system cannot discern proper logic structure capable of resolving a binary condition, the resulting indeterminate argument must also be provided. However, indeterminate results are not of themselves proper results from a Boolean condition and represent only an erroneous or unexpected condition.
What is needed is a method for providing computer processing systems a mechanism for elucidating and validating regulatory statutes and legal constraints.